This section introduces aspects that may be helpful to facilitate a better understanding of the inventions. Accordingly, the statements of this section are to be read in this light and are not to be understood as admissions about what is in the prior art or what is not in the prior art.
Advances in data communication have led to the emergence and growth of data centers for the storage of information, such datacenters being a component of centralized storage sometimes colloquially referred to as “the cloud”. Increasing reliance on such centralized storage by businesses and individuals is expected to require new strategies for interconnection of optical communication nodes to, e.g. reduce costs and increase data capacity. Such datacenters are therefore expected to require massive metro-area interconnection bandwidths in the near future, e.g. on the order of several thousand 100G point-to-point connections over distances of ˜100 km. Low-cost plug-and-play architectures for this market are therefore essential to support such growth in data transmission capacity.